[jlgaddis]

I upgraded my home network from a Cisco 3750G to a Brocade ICX 6610 a couple years ago...

  - 40 GbE to the "new" (in process of being set up and deployed) NAS

  - 10 GbE to the "old" (being phased out) NAS (was: 40 GbE)

  - 40 GbE to my workstation

  - 10 GbE to the "other machine" on my desk

  - n x 10 GbE to the cluster of ESXi servers

  - 10 GbE to other misc. servers in the rack

  - Multiple 10 GbE and 1 GbE links to the PTP GrandMasters and NTP servers

  - Plus all the various PoE devices (APs, VoIP phones, etc.) and miscellaneous other hosts (NTP appliances, DRACs, PDUs, NetBotz, etc.) at 1 GbE and/or 100 Mbps

Unfortunately, I'm just about out of 10 GbE ports so I may need to get another ...

Highly recommend the ICX 6610 in particular. The only other Brocade (Ethernet) switches I've personally managed are the "access layer" FCX switches (in an old position 10+ years ago).

[metadat]

Did you have to deal with any 10GbE port licensing for the 6610?

What did you do for devices which don't support 10G optical?

[cmatthias]

The author of the guide linked to by OP has a series of docs for resetting the 6610 to factory settings and licensing all the ports. My understanding is that especially for the old switches like the 6610, it’s not possible to buy licenses anymore so you can just unlock them.

For copper 10gbe connections, you have two main choices: you can use DAC cables which end up being cheap but are hard or impossible to fish through walls or terminate at a patch panel, or you can use a 10G-BASET transceiver which gives you standard RJ45 jack but costs about $50 for each end of the connection plus the cost of a cat6 or better cable.

Edit: obviously if you already have a device with a copper 10gbit port, then you only need one transceiver (for the switch port), and using a DAC is a no-go since DACs require SFP ports at both ends of the connection.